The artist Felipe Baeza knows a thing or two about waiting for the bus. Growing up in Chicago in the 1990s, he drove the city bus alone from the age of nine. He attended Cooper Union in New York to study art and took the bus or subway from his home in Spanish Harlem to get to class. This year, living without a car in Los Angeles for a while, he took a bus — or two or three — to get around town, though sometimes after an absurdly long wait, he gave up and called an Uber.
Starting August 9, the artist, whose home base is Brooklyn, will give people something to think about during their own journey on public transport or purgatory. As part of a Public Art Fund program designed to reach people where they live or commute, Baeza will have eight of his mixed-media, collage-style paintings reproduced on some 400 JCDecaux bus shelters in New York, Boston and Chicago, as well as Querétaro and Léon in Mexico. They will also appear on digital newsstands and kiosks in Mexico City.
“People assume I don’t drive because of my illegal past,” says Baeza, who immigrated from Celaya, Mexico, at age seven, without papers and now has DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status. “I just never had the desire or the interest. I like walking or taking the bus or train. Navigating a city by public transport changes the way you experience the landscape, the world.”
And his paintings for the project – fantastical, ritual images of human bodies in various stages of transformation or regeneration – touch on the power of mobility. Speaking from a small office-like studio at the Getty, where he had a nine-month residency that ended in June, Baeza called his subjects “unruly forms” or “fugitive bodies” that don’t adhere to norms or laws. Some seem to transform into sea creatures or mythical birds; others are on the verge of flight.
Many of his figures are fragmented, missing legs or torsos. But they have long, enveloping arms, virgin Mary-like shrouds, or spiky energy fields that make them seem powerful and protected. “Violence is not my intention,” Baeza said. “Even if I only show a head, I don’t see it as a decapitated figure, but as a full body – a body in the process of being.”
Baeza’s artwork also defies a simple narrative of the migrant as a victim, said Los Angeles curator César García-Alvarez, who gave the artist an early research at the Mistake Room in LA in 2020 and this summer included five of his works in a tribute to Hélio Oiticica at New York’s Lisson Gallery. “Being a poc artist, queer artist and immigrant artist, there is an expectation that the work should be intensely political and critique the systems of oppression,” said the curator. “But I also find Felipe’s work remarkably and unapologetically beautiful; it is ambitious and expansive.”
Along with Catholic iconography, including many thorns, the new artworks draw on displaced Mesoamerican antiquities the artist has found in American museum collections—objects that, while not necessarily looted, have been taken from their native cultures and context. He delved deeper into the subject during his residency at the Getty Research Institute, borrowing stacks of museum catalogs and covering a studio wall with photocopies of startling images, from an Olmec mask to a Nazca pot-bellied drum.
Some of these Mesoamerican shapes recur in the new work, including an almost cartoonish Jalisco jar from the Art Institute of Chicago identified as “an open-necked vessel in the shape of a human head, possibly deceased.” (“It looks very alive to me,” said the artist). Then there’s the spiky, elaborate headdress adorning a Remojadas ceramic in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that Baeza adapted to crown one of his figures.
These displaced antiquities, trapped in the US, provided a way to “think about the immigrant experience,” said Baeza, who must apply for “pre-parole” to travel internationally under DACA restrictions. “People come to a new country and can’t get a work permit or driver’s license or move freely, but even within those forms of suspension, you learn to thrive and survive. I like to think that these objects are doing the same thing, thriving despite the limitations.”
Baeza’s compositional process usually starts with coloring his own paper: collecting pigment and water on a large plastic sheet on the floor and pressing paper against it to absorb the color in “uncontrolled” ways. He then mounts one of those unevenly colored or striped sheets on a small wooden panel to serve as a canvas, while he cuts other hand-painted sheets of paper (and sometimes photos from magazines) into smaller pieces to assemble his alien figures. These cut pieces are then embedded in wood that the artist carved using graphic tools — “it’s like a mosaic technique,” he said.
The result is a highly layered work of art – somewhere between painting, printmaking and collage. Critics call his work “intimate,” suggesting that one can feel the artist’s careful process of making marks.
A challenge with the super-sized reproductions of bus shelters is maintaining a sense of intimacy and texture. While the original artwork measures up to 16 inches by 12 inches, the bus stop prints span nearly 6 feet by 4 feet. Some subtly colored backgrounds on the original artwork in the series end up looking like concrete.
“In a perfect world, I’d like the texture to come through,” Baeza said. “But I was very pleased with the final trials I saw at the end.”
His training in printmaking helped. Baeza applied to Cooper Union because it was free—”my only path to higher education”—and was drawn to the deep-seated joys of etching and woodcut making. He graduated in 2009 and landed a “dream job” at Two Palms in New York, where he screenprinted alongside celebrated artists such as Mel Bochner. In 2016, he participated in the MFA program at Yale, where he found that one of his collagraph plates – a map of the US that he drew and built with string – was more convincing on its own than inked to make prints. He acquired art business know-how as part of the first cohort in Titus Kaphar’s residency program, NXTHVN, in New Haven, Connecticut. “I became a studio rat,” he said. “The network side was also extremely helpful.”
By then, Baeza was busy creating his “unmanageable” mixed-media figures, several of which appeared in his 2020 survey of the Mistake Room. Although the pandemic canceled that show, Cecilia Alemani, a leading curator, was able to see it and include Baeza in her 2022 exhibition “The Milk of Dreams” at the Venice Biennale. alongside surrealist greats such as Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo (who were brought together in exile in Mexico in the 1940s).
The two painters were known for imbuing their works with mysticism. In turn, Nicholas Baume, the director of the Public Art Fund, saw the Biennale and was struck by the “materiality and spirituality” of Baeza’s work there. “I also recognized that what he is doing is very relevant to current conversations about it identity and being an outsider, what it means not to be a citizen, not to be a heterosexual man and to feel somehow in between spaces.”
Beginning in New York in 2017 with Ai Weiwei’s “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” exhibit, the Public Art Fund’s bus shelter program now takes place about twice a year. The most recent commission, by Aïda Muluneh, was the first to go international, and its success led Baume to propose a presence in Mexico for Baeza’s work. His team lined up bus shelters in Querétaro and Léon, not far from Baeza’s hometown, as well as kiosks in Mexico City.
And chances are the artist will be able to see this project in Mexico. “I’m hoping to take a trip there in September,” said Baeza, who was on “pre-parole” through November to travel for work reasons. “My whole family, except my parents, is still in Celaya. It would be great to experience my art with them as they have never seen it in person.
